Jon Lord: Concerto for Group and Orchestra (Blu-ray)

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All Rise...

Judge Jim Thomas will now retire to his vinyl rock collection.

The Charge

What lies beyond the smoke on the water.

The Case

Evaluating this release depends a lot on your perspective. If you consider
the primary subject of the release to be the documentary chronicling the 2012
recording of Jon Lord's Concerto for Group and Orchestra, things might
not turn out well—structurally it's more than a little bit wobbly, it's
technically inconsistent, and it assumes an audience already familiar with the
subject matter.

But let me back up for a bit.

In 1968, heavy metal band Deep Purple had one of its first major successes:
a concerto written by their keyboardist, Jon Lord. The piece combined the
disparate forms of hard rock and classical music, and did so with a surprising
dexterity; a critical and popular triumph, the piece was performed by the group
for the next year or so, culminating in a performance at the Hollywood Bowl in
1970.

In 1994, Jon Lord was considering doing a new recording of the piece, as he
had some new ideas that he wanted to incorporate. It was then that he made a
horrifying discovery—the score had been lost. No one knows what happened,
but they think it got left at the Hollywood Bowl back in 1970. In one of the
more amazing pieces of musical lore, a Dutch music student, Marco de Goeji, was
studying the concerto. When he learned that the score had been lost he took it
upon himself to recreate the score, transcribing it based on existing
recordings. The reconstructed concerto debuted in 1999.

In 2012 began Lord began a studio recording of the piece—despite the
energy of a live recording, the wildly disparate instrumentation made proper
mixing problematic at best. He hand picked soloists, fine-tuned the
score…but the project took a blow when Lord was diagnosed with terminal
pancreatic cancer—despite his increasingly frail health, he pushed
through, recording his remaining solos, overseeing the final sessions, and
listening to the final master recording just a few days before his death on July
16, 2012.

That's probably the bare minimum you need to know; otherwise, you will have
some problems following the documentary. There's no clearly discerned structure,
nor is there a clear focus—it feels like a lot of footage hastily cobbled
together. It's frustrating at times, because there are too many subjects that
don't really get the attention they deserve—the audio engineering alone
could probably warrant its own documentary, as most of the rock elements were
recorded individually, placing the soloists in the odd position of having to
improvise to the already recorded orchestra. More of Lord talking about the
piece in a more structured manner would also have been a strong addition. The
viewer has to spend way too much time trying to piece information together.

The concerto, on the other hand, suffers from none of these issues. After
repeated viewing, the piece is really starting to grow on me. This is no
gimmick, nor is it a matter of adding a layer of strings to a song. Lord draws
from his influences (you may hear echoes of Holst, Tchaikovsky, and
Shostakovich, among others) and develops some sophisticated motifs, playing the
orchestra and the band against each other, leading to a triumphant synthesis in
the third movement. It's a wonderful piece—though you may have a slight
battle with cognitive dissonance as you try to reconcile this piece with the
image of Deep Purple, once listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as "The
World's Loudest Band." In fact, for this recording, Lord selected several
soloists, such as Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson, who weren't associated with
Deep Purple in order to distance the piece from the band; after all it is Jon
Lord's Concerto, not Deep Purple's.

Technically, Eagle Rock's Jon Lord: Concerto for Group and Orchestra
(Blu-ray) is a mixed bag. On the documentary side, the audio is clear, but
video is wildly uneven, even if you only look at the recent material. Some looks
like good digital video, some looks washed out, like someone grabbed an old
Digital8 camera that had been buried in their truck for the past 15 years. The
concert itself, on the other hand, is just magnificent (we expect nothing less
from Eagle Rock). You get two versions of the piece—a stereo version on
CD, perfect for your mp3 player, and an audio-only DTS-HD 5.1 track. Both
versions allow the soloists to shine, in particular Lord's blistering organ work
and Steve Morse's ethereal guitar work in the 3rd movement. Both versions of the
concerto are labeled as "extras," but all the other material, including the
supposed main feature, is in service of the music, so go figure. The other
extras that are actually extras include extended interviews with conductor Paul
Mann and the aforementioned Marco de Goeji. In both cases, good information, but
a lack of structure makes them hard to follow at times. There's also some
footage of the recording sessions. Material from all three are used in the main
feature.

As a documentary, it's a bit of a mess, but the concerto itself—if
you'll pardon the expression—rocks. This is more of a testament to
Lord's genius than any documentary could hope to be.

The Verdict

Not guilty.

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